Rising from the ashes – still crazy after all these years?

(with credit to Paul Simon)

The French House

I found this blog post from 5 years ago – interesting to reflect on how much has changed – writing this in France, in our dream home, for one thing – how much is the same – the actions I was choosing then I choose now, so perhaps they are perennials which keep life moving and us growing.

And, yes, definitely still crazy, and delighted to be so.

Ash Wednesday

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent for those who follow Christian traditions. I’m not a churchgoer any more, but I still recall the walk up the church aisle to experience the scratchy feel of ash being marked in the form of a cross onto my forehead by the priest. I guess it must have happened for each of the 14 years of my schooldays, and more.

I was brought up in a devout Roman Catholic family, and my childhood memories of Lent are about loads of pancakes on Shrove Tuesday prior to ‘giving up’ something I liked on Ash Wednesday for the remaining 40 days and 40 nights in preparation for Easter. It was usually chocolate. It probably still should be chocolate. Or wine. Or cheese.

Anyway, I haven’t given anything up for Lent for more years than I care to recall.
And I’m not about to start again.

Not Giving Up

But I am going to do something. Not penance, but productivity. Not denial, but delight.

I am going to do more.

No, not more chocolate, wine and cheese. Not more of anything material. But definitely more fun. More stuff that delights, surprises and stretches me. Maybe even more stuff that’s good for me like – walking and water.

Being pragmatic, things and actions I’m in control of:

Meeting more people, online and offline

Launching my leadership and transformation retreats at my new home in SW France

Creating more crucial, constructive conversations

Writing at least one blog every week

More exuberance and fun

More kindness and love

People Ideas Action

So I’m not giving anything up.

I’m keeping hold of what I have that I love.

But I am expanding my life with fresh people, ideas, and most crucially, actions. It’s going to be a fascinating forty days, for sure.

Spring Talks

And as part of the action – crucial, constructive conversations – if you would like to share your experiences I’m also doing a series of 5 minute ‘Spring Talks’ interviews for publication so contact me for more information and let me know if you want to join in.

Understanding and Reflection

I’ve had a lot of experiences of Being Love, of practising Love, and holding Loving spaces as I’ve been deliberately researching Love for the past three years. It really seems though that my whole life has been a crucible for developing awareness and sensitivity, resilience and understanding of Love in its many ways of being present and expressed.

As part of deepening and expanding my inner understanding of Love at Work whilst I prepare my ‘data’ for publication, I find myself exploring various texts, ancient and modern. At the moment I am contemplating the Tao Te Ching and A Course in Miracles, both of which have recently re-emerged into my life.

The latter has surfaced again because I’ve been reading for review Gary Renard’s fascinating ‘Love Has Forgotten No-One’ (Hay House, November 2013), and I was drawn to the Tao again at the beginning of 2014 and treated myself to a beautiful volume translated by Stephen Mitchell.

Action

What I’m choosing to do is to take the Tao verse by verse, one each day, and sit with it as inspiration and insight, and to dip into the chapters of A Course in Miracles, whilst following the lessons in the workbook as my course of action. It’s an experiment in taking existing material and allowing it to expand my work on Love. I’m fascinated to experience what unfolds and flows.

Meaning

With my ‘Love in the Boardroom’ book I am currently sifting through the many ‘meanings’ my research participants have given to and for Love, and derived from Love. So this snippet taken from Chapter 1 of ACIM (A Course in Miracles) resonates:

“The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of Love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of Love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance.”

Closely followed by:

“Miracles occur naturally as expressions of Love. The real miracle is the love that inspires them. In this sense, everything that comes from Love is a miracle.”

The first lesson in the workbook also relates to meaning – in terms of undoing attachment to the material:

“Nothing I see in this room (on this street, from this window, in this place) means anything.”

The Tao Te Ching tells me that

“The name that can be named
Is not the eternal Name.”

and that:

“The unnameable is the eternally real.”

The learning here seems to be that it is in the unknown, the un-manifest, mystery, beyond, that real Love, and what is real, lies. And about letting go of the meaning we attribute to what we have created in our world.

A Leader of Love

Christine Miller

The Mandela we know and love represents freedom, trust, integrity, a new era for South Africa, and inspiration for the rest of the world.

We don’t doubt his struggles and suffering whilst imprisoned for 27 years on Robben Island, and that the tough times he overcame led to a better future for South Africa’s people and rippled out to affect us all. He was a world figure, a leader whose following loved him for his caring, his dedication and persistence, and for his evident love of mankind, of justice, equality and freedom.

He did not shirk difficult decisions, knew when to step back and let others lead, and also knew how to be loving in a strong and courageous way which only increased his ability to influence for good. We saw him as quiet power, a humble source of commitment to change, and a transformational, undeniable force for good.

He was a human being: a human being who represented Love at Work – and now his memory and the spirit of his actions, words and way of being remain to inspire us to be, ourselves, Leaders of Love.

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” —Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela

In honour of his life, with joy and anticipation of a legacy fulfilled in his own lifetime.

Below, a short film from 21 Icons of the last photoshoot with Nelson Mandela.

We take an exclusive journey with Adrian Steirn to Nelson Mandela’s home in Qunu, Eastern Cape, and experience the warmth and intimacy that permeated the atmosphere during the portrait shoot. We also hear what others have to say about the greatest icon of them all.

Those of you who know about my long-term research project into Love – Love in the Boardroomand Love in Organisations via www.Loveworks.co – will understand exactly why I was attracted to the ‘Empathy and Compassion in Society’ conference which took place in London’s South Bank on October 24th as the subject matter fits perfectly with many aspects of my work in the field of human potential for ReSourcemagazine.

This piece is a quick snapshot of the event; every part of the day was valuable, and all will be included in fuller pieces to follow. There was a stellar line up of 20 speakers including guest of honour, Karen Armstrong (Charter for Compassion), Daniel Goleman (of Emotional Intelligence fame), Adam Grant (leading US business school Wharton’s youngest tenured professor and highest rated teacher) and Jo Berry, Founder of Building Bridges for Peace.

The conference offered a rich and varied feast of ideas and practical suggestions for increasing compassion in society, from schools to workplaces, in healthcare and homes, from the individual to the collective, with great sign posts to research from Stanford’s Emma Seppala and enthusiasm shining throughout.

The day began with a message, courtesy of David Rand, Executive Director of The Tenzin Gyatso Institute, from HH the Dalai Lama, who said there should be many more conferences dedicated to compassion, as loving kindness is such an important quality and way of being. This was followed by a moving talk from Karen Armstrong about the great need for compassion in our world. Karen is currently working with TED on a major international project to propagate the Charter for Compassion, which was crafted by leading thinkers in six of the world’s religions.

Engagingly com-passionate Associate Professor of the University of Texas, Kristin Neff treated us to a range of techniques for being compassionate to ourselves as well as to others, so that we gave ourselves permission for self-compassion, Kristin’s area of interest and outstanding expertise. Kristin is author of the internationally acclaimed book Self-Compassion(2011) and is also featured in the bestselling book and award-winning documentary The Horse Boy, which chronicles her family’s journey to Mongolia where they trekked on horseback to find healing for her autistic son.

A round table discussion gave us great insights from some active advocates and practitioners of compassion including Richard Barrett, an author, speaker and social commentator on the evolution of human values in business and society. He is the Founder and Chairman of the Barrett Values Centre, a values-based leadership programme used in 60 countries to support more than 4,000 organisations. His recent publications include The Values-Driven Organisation: Unleashing Human Potential for Performance and Profit(2013) and Love, Fear and the Destiny of Nations (2011).

Another panelist was Maureen Cooper, the author of ‘The Compassionate Mind Approach to Reducing Stress’, which is due to be published in the UK in September 2013.

Maureen is also founder of Awareness in Action, a consultancy dedicated to the secular application of mindfulness, meditation and compassion in the workplace.

Also on the panel was inspirational and entertaining Kevin Jones, headmaster of St John’s College School in Cambridge, who was awarded the 2013 Tatler Prize for Best Headmaster. One of the school’s many strengths is its mindfulness programme, part of the school’s emotions for learning project designed to strengthen children’s emotional resilience.

Paul Ekman, who is a leading clinical psychologist and pioneer in the study of emotions, came to us by video message and discussed whether compassion is an emotion and whether it can be cultivated. His 1970s research shows that emotions are universal and the facial expressions associated with some emotions are common to all humans.

The afternoon brought us a selection of valuable workshops, followed by examples of ways in which compassion is being encouraged in a number of organisations from Tesco, through The Reader Organisation and Jane Davis MBE to hospitals in Australia, via Liz Lobb and Alexandra Yuille, insight into the concept of ‘Give and Take’ from Adam Grant, and Daniel Goleman’swonderful speech about leadership and compassion, about which more to follow.

This conference offered such a packed and powerful schedule, it will take me a while to process the individual elements and report further, but in the meantime if you have some time this weekend, do register and go along to the workshops, you will be doing a great kindness to yourself by learning more. Do visit the link below and find out more.

This poem arose from seeing a film on the BBC’s ‘The Great British Year’ of a February woodland garden in Gloucestershire, filled with snowdrops in bloom, their delicacy and beauty carpeting the ground with that fabulous first sign of winter’s end approaching.

Tears sprang to my eyes as I recalled with great clarity the time when I was about two and a half years old when I had my tonsils out. I still have strong memories of this. I can see clearly the area pre-theatre where gas cylinders and bottles of blood were stored, I feel the cold crisp linen of the hospital bed and the hard metal bars that kept me imprisoned there. I recall not being able to call out to the nurses for help. I remember the pain of my raw throat, and, acutely, the loneliness.

My beautiful Mother, Jane

In those distant days when I was little, parents weren’t allowed into hospital with their children, and visiting hours were very strictly enforced. I was desolate, in pain, and afraid, and when my mother did arrive with a beautiful bunch of snowdrops, and a pretty little silver hair slide, which I treasured for years, I was filled with joy and relief.

The image of those snowdrops is still fresh in my mind, all these years later, and as I watched the scene in the film, these words, ‘And she brought me snowdrops’, erupted superbly into my consciousness and demanded to be expanded, expressed and offered as a token of gratitude and Love to my dearly departed mother, whose healing, radiant presence is still with me every day.

And it also just happens to be National Poets Day today, so I dedicate this to all poets, everyone, everywhere, may your creativity flow with abundance.

Strarta: London’s Newest Art Fair

It’s a real honour to be speaking at the inaugural Strarta Art Fair in the prestigious Saatchi Gallery in London’s Kings Road next week, and the topic of The Love of Art is, of course, particularly relevant and resonant with my research and writing for the Love at Work and Love in the Boardroom projects which currently fill my life and engage my attention.

Developing material for this talk is a rather delicious experience, combining some of my favourite interests and passions, and sending me on colourful, poetic and richly rewarding journeys into imagination, creativity, connection, inspiration – and Love.

Yes, Love, of course. Love as energy, Love as inspiration, Love as – well, a fount of great excitement and impulses to create.

I was asked to write a few paragraphs for publicity about what I’ll be talking about on October 11th, and when my words were greeted by the team with great enthusiasm, the suggestion was to share with my readers here.

For those of you who are coming along, here is a foretaste, for those who aren’t, here’s a little snippet of what I’m sure will be developing as a theme over the next few months.

Enjoy!

The Love of Art

Christine Miller asks: What do we talk about, when we talk about Love?

Some think of Love as a fluffy, soft thing, based on romance, muddied by weakness and scandal, dismissed as an irrelevance, and relegated solely to close relationships and family. Love can be taboo, and not for discussion at our work, in business, or in places where serious decisions are made. But the kind of love of which Christine Miller speaks, which she has researched for three years, and observed as present throughout organisations and activities across the globe, evident in courageous, creative individuals, is not a weak and feeble thing. It is a strong, powerful, demanding love, inspiring, creative – a love that insists on courage, on dedication, on honesty, trust and openness. This is a tough, even fierce, kind of love, which needs much more determination, awareness and thought than the options of fear, indifference and apathy; and being truly loving is much more challenging than being closed, cold and remote.

So what do we really mean by Love?And more particularly, what do we mean by ‘The Love of Art’?
Who are the people who have a Love of Art?
For ‘Art Lover’ is a common term used to describe a wide range of people from the dilettante to the committed expert.

When we consider the ‘Love of Art’, we can speak of those who love art and express their love by dealing in, buying, displaying and collecting art, who demonstrate their Love by supporting both artists and art. These are people whose Love expresses itself for the finished piece, and its value, in service to the creation of the finished work of art.

We can speak of the artist, the initiator and ‘imagineer’, and their consuming Love of Art. These are the essential creators, demonstrating their Love and passion for their own artistic expressions, the power of imagination, their skills, struggles, determination, their dedication, vocation and valuable gifts.

We can also speak of the critic, whose love of art drives them to seek perfection and provoke improvement. We can ask – is a critic who tears apart an artist’s work still expressing their Love of Art? This is the ‘Tough Love’ of Art, also requiring strength and courage to express.

The Love that Christine Miller will speak of at Strarta encompasses all these aspects, and propels us even further to explore the power and fuel that is Love.

For we are talking here of an energy and connection which pervades the entire universe, and is one of the strongest forces available to us, which whilst it is often carelessly, casually mentioned, is little understood and definitely under employed.

Come and explore the Love of Art expressed in the powerful relationships between the artist, their work and the many stakeholders in their artistic expression.